


high-collared robes and heartless indifference

by suitablyskippy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Background Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto, Crack, Gen, Living the Sidekick Lifestyle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-19 23:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3628659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The wizarding world will be at war within the month.” The headmaster’s expression is concealed behind the spiralled orange mask, but his voice is sombre. “Naruto Uzumaki will be leading the resistance against powers of great darkness.”</p><p>Suigetsu groans loudly enough that a good portion of the Uchiha deputation further down the table turn identical withering, red-eyed glares toward him. “Again?” he says, anguished, “<i>again</i>?”</p><p>(It’s a universal constant that the world revolves around Naruto and Sasuke’s melodrama. Unfortunately, it’s also a universal constant that Sasuke requires sidekicks.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	high-collared robes and heartless indifference

**Author's Note:**

> Shameless liberties have been taken with the HP universe for the sake of crack! Apologies in advance for the fact this probably goes against canon in about a thousand different ways.

**_Sixth year  
_**   
Early that February, the headmaster stands up behind the High Table at breakfast one morning and bids silence. Karin’s shock-haired cousin stands up there too, looking uncharacteristically serious – which, by his usual standards, means he’s not hexing anyone, or crashing his broomstick through any windows, or jumping from any high places while attempting to innovate wizard parkour. He stands without fidgeting, gazing solemnly out across the crowded hall. 

“The wizarding world will be at war within the month.” The headmaster’s expression is concealed behind the spiralled orange mask, but his voice is sombre. “Naruto Uzumaki will be leading the resistance against powers of great darkness.”

Suigetsu groans loudly enough that a good portion of the Uchiha deputation further down the table turn identical withering, red-eyed glares toward him. “Again?” he says, anguished, “ _again_? Karin, can’t you do something about that guy?”

“You think I wouldn’t if I could?” she demands. “If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m listening.”

“ _I_ dunno – break his fucking wand in half? Stop him leading the resistance against powers of great darkness literally every single other week?”

“That’s the dream,” Karin says, and continues glowering up at her cousin. She’s estranged from his side of the family, but nowhere near far enough for her liking. 

Across from them, Sasuke sits with his elbows propped on the table, his hands laced before his mouth. He’s gazing into the soup tureen with a look of darkly brooding preoccupation, which is how he’s gazed at most things ever since he first hit puberty. 

“We will fight against Naruto,” he says, at last. His voice is very low. His gaze has grown, if possible, more darkly brooding still. 

“We’ll – wait,” says Suigetsu, “wait, hang on. You wanna join the war?”

“Yes,” says Sasuke. 

“ _This_ war?” He waves toward the stage. “The one Karin’s cousin’s gonna be in?”

“Yes,” says Sasuke. 

Karin looks to Suigetsu. Suigetsu’s looking at her, too. As one, they look beyond Sasuke towards the Hufflepuff table: where Juugo sits in blissful ignorance, Kimimaro at his side, doing a not-very-sneaky job of feeding scraps to the small brown owl concealed inside his robes. 

Karin heaves a sigh. “ _Fine_ ,” she says. “Fine, whatever. You’re just lucky I’m not busy next week.”

“Yeah, alright,” says Suigetsu. “But you wanna give us more warning next time, Sasuke, okay? You can’t just assume we’re always up to fight whatever random war you feel like.”

“What else would you be doing,” says Sasuke. 

The question is completely flat. In the moment of silence, another sideways glance is exchanged. 

“...Having fun with friends,” says Karin. Her voice is just as flat as Sasuke’s. It’s not particularly convincing. 

“Yeah, all my other friends,” says Suigetsu. “Who I’ve got loads of. And... Quidditch. Is it Quidditch season? I’m gonna score so many Quidditch goals.”

“Hm,” says Sasuke. His look of darkly brooding preoccupation travels up from the soup tureen, towards Karin’s cousin still standing solemn and triumphant on the stage. The look of darkly brooding preoccupation turns to a scowl, and Sasuke picks up his spoon and resumes his dinner. 

“Quidditch goals?” says Karin. 

“Shut the fuck up,” says Suigetsu. 

 

+++

 

Karin doesn’t want to be the one to break the news to Juugo, but she has no choice: if it’s left to Suigetsu, he’s certain to do it in the most crassly insensitive way possible. Suigetsu doesn’t want to break the news to Juugo either, but since Karin would only do it in the most aggressively insensitive way possible, he reluctantly accepts his duty. They shoulder their burdens without telling each other, set out on a hunt for Juugo without telling each other, and unexpectedly reunite in the Slytherin common room with an argument so explosive that a nearby prefect takes it upon herself to start evacuating first years from the area. 

Juugo waits it out, dolefully perched on the edge of a chaise longue. Most of the vital information he manages to pick out from in between all the yelling; by the time they’re done, or at least too short on breath to continue, the news of Sasuke’s war has been thoroughly broken. 

“Do you,” begins Juugo – and pauses. He shifts awkwardly forwards on the chaise longue, which is upholstered in green velvet and far too artistically delicate to support his weight. “Um. Do you... think, ever – about how Sasuke’s involved with a _lot_ of this kind of stuff?”

Karin jolts around to face him, alight at once with blazing indignation. 

“I mean,” Juugo clarifies, hastily, “not that he causes it, so much, except for when he does, but just – he just gets involved with it a lot. Don’t you think?”

“If you’re trying to say something about Sasuke, just _say_ it,” orders Suigetsu. “None of this sneaky shit, okay?”

“I’m just pointing it out,” Juugo says, diplomatically. “I’ve – well, actually I’ve been thinking about it. You can trace it back,” he begins, rummaging through his bag for spare parchment, “all the way to first year—”

And then one thing leads to another, and in that particular corner of the Slytherin common room the afternoon passes by in growing outrage as, piece by piece, they draw up a timeline of the bullshit and conclude that it _did_ start with the mess back in first year, halfway through the autumn term: when Karin’s cousin and Sasuke and that pink-haired Gryffindor girl got themselves involved in some weird-ass wizarding turf war, duelling to the death with a friend of Suigetsu’s older brother and his girly, acupuncturist sidekick. 

Karin pauses, tapping Juugo’s quill against the page. “Did we ever find out what the hell was going on there?” 

“I don’t think so,” says Juugo – and then, plaintively: “Could you stop chewing my highlighter pen, please?” 

Suigetsu obliges. There are tooth marks in the pen’s plastic casing when he sets it back down. “Yeah, I dunno either,” he says. “I got a day off for Zabuza’s funeral, though. _That_ wasn’t bad.” It was pretty fucking cool, actually. The wake afterwards was held at Zabuza’s house, and Suigetsu had stolen a Muggle flickknife from the dead kid’s bedside drawer: the start of a beautiful collection. 

Second year, of course, was the shit-storm with the reintroduction of traditional wizard death battles in place of end-of-year exams. The fresh-faced new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher who’d suggested it had eventually been unmasked as the notorious Dark Wizard and former Head of Ravenclaw, Lord Orochimaru, and was then defeated in open combat by Karin’s cousin and Sasuke – but by that point, the rest of the students had mostly all already duelled each other into serious injury, lasting trauma, and death, deep in the black heart of the Forbidden Forest. 

“That year was fine, actually,” says Suigetsu, after a moment. 

“Better than exams,” Karin agrees. “Me and Sasuke really _connected_ that year. Really got to know each other. Really bonded, personally speaking.”

“Well,” says Juugo, “actually, the death toll—”

But Karin has already lost herself to fond recollection. A single beam of blue light blitzing away a repulsively oversized spider, and the entrance into her life of her dark-haired, red-eyed saviour, his hand held out to pull her from the dirt – and, simultaneously, from the loveless tedium of life pre-Sasuke. Technically, she’d already known him for almost two years by that point, but Karin’s never bothered to enforce much of a boundary between her memory and her imagination. 

Juugo’s still going on about the death toll. Juugo’s a great guy, but for as long as they’ve known him, he’s _never_ had his priorities in order. 

 

+++

 ** _Second year  
_**   
“Who’s the big guy?” Suigetsu had said, in a very noisy whisper. Karin had been wondering the exact same thing, but she stamped on his foot and told him to shut up anyway. “His robes’re too short,” Suigetsu added, a few minutes later, and then, “He smells like _dung_ , holy shit – oi, any of you lot wanna swap tables with me?”

“Keep your voice down!” Karin hissed, and she’d have cuffed him round the head to hammer the message home but the new kid got there first, too-short Hufflepuff robes billowing out as he rounded on Suigetsu and decked him with a single punch. His pale eyes were lit with something mad. He definitely, literally, _grossly_ smelled like shit – and his bellow was loud enough to rattle the glass panes of the Herbology greenhouse in their frames. 

“ _I help to muck out the hippogriffs after their morning feed_!” __  
  
After a moment, the new kid raised his fist and stared down at it, like it wasn’t what he’d been expecting to find there; and then he stared at Suigetsu, who had cracked his head on the countertop on the way down and was now lying, semi-concussed, in a pile of soil and snaggle-rooted bulbs and shattered terracotta plant-pots. The entire class was silent. 

“Um,” said the new kid. He cleared his throat. He seemed embarrassed. “I have some – issues. With my temper. I’m sorry about your friend. I – um, I hope he’s okay...”

“Oh, Suigetsu’s not my friend,” said Karin, and kicked his unconscious form to prove it. “Anyone who attacks him is, though. I’m Karin.”

“Juugo,” said Juugo: and that was it for Juugo, who could be found so often in the Slytherin dungeons from then on that it seemed almost surprising when winter came and his colours were shown, by his scarf and by his too-small mittens, to be the yellow-and-black of Hufflepuff. 

 

+++

 ** _First year  
_**   
Karin’s never been quite sure how Suigetsu met Sasuke – he’s mentioned it, sometimes, but every clue he drops seems so extraordinarily homoerotic and based in shared male nudity that she’s disinclined to believe him. _She_ met Sasuke on the King’s Cross platform, a dark and beautiful vision in custom-fit robes, and later spent a blissful half an hour admiring the nape of his neck as he queued before her in line for the Sorting Hat, both of them ignoring the vociferously hyperactive attentions of the blond boy directly behind her. _Sasuke Uchiha – Slytherin. Karin Uzumaki – Slytherin._ Nothing could have burst the bubble of perfect happiness in which she had come to exist; nothing, but for what happened immediately afterwards. 

_Naruto Uzumaki – Gryffindor._

__“So he’s a relative of yours,” said Sasuke, already at the Uchiha portion of the Slytherin table. He said nothing else, but it was contemptuous, and it was enough. The blond boy was still on stage, punching the air and whooping, brandishing his wand. Karin stared at him. Her bubble of perfect happiness had burst, and it had been replaced by a surreal new version of the world: one in which she not only possessed a living relative, but in which that relative was irritating as all hell.

“You don’t _look_ alike,” said the damp kid from the train, his tone dubious. “You sure you’re related?”

Karin took a break from scowling furiously at the stage to scowl furiously at him instead. “I’ve never seen him before in my entire life, moron.”

“Well, I feel sorrier for him,” said the damp kid, “finding out he’s related to _you_ – that’s got to ruin a guy’s day,” and then he grinned, with a mouth of the fucking nastiest teeth Karin had ever seen. She had smacked his face into his soup bowl. He had shoved her backward off the bench. Sasuke had ignored them both, his chin in his hand, glowering across the hall to where Karin’s mystery relative had scrambled up onto the Gryffindor table just to flip him off, sticking out his tongue and gurning with sound effects so loud they could be heard all the way across the Great Hall. 

 

+++

 ** _Fourth year  
_**   
Hogsmeade visits are cancelled in late November as a result of Hogsmeade being entirely destroyed. It’s the work of a small troupe of vibrantly ginger ex-students with a taste for world domination and elaborate facial piercings, all of whom are defeated by Karin’s cousin in a single dramatic showdown, fought in the town’s smoking wreckage. Rumour gets back to the castle that Karin’s cousin is an unregistered Animagus, with a fox form the size of a Hungarian Horntail. 

“Overachiever,” is all Suigetsu has to say on the matter, but Suigetsu is content to spend his weekends floating, half-asleep, in the shallows of the lake: and Karin is _not_. Karin _misses_ Hogsmeade visits. She cuts a photo of her cousin from the front page of the Daily Prophet, pins it to the post of her bed, and mutters heartfelt curses at his stupid, grinning face every night before lights out. Sometimes, the glossy A4 photo of Sasuke she keeps pinned to the opposite post of her bed joins in. 

The issue of Karin’s cousin reaches an intolerable climax two weeks before term ends for the Christmas holidays, while Karin and Suigetsu come trudging gloomily down the stairs from the Great Hall with glitteringly fake flakes of snow in their hair and the folds of their robes, courtesy of one of the many festive boobytraps laid by Hashirama, God of Wizards, the castle’s resident poltergeist. They’re in the middle of a lacklustre argument over whether it’ll snow a lot tomorrow, or just a little, or maybe somewhere in the middle, when they turn a corner and see Sasuke. Spurred by what seems to be a rather violent passion, he’s making out with Karin’s cousin against the dungeon wall. 

“What,” says Karin, before she can stop herself, her voice dead flat. 

Karin’s cousin is even more dishevelled than usual, his shirt rucked up and untucked, his red-and-gold tie loosened. One hand is fisted in the wayward black spikes at the back of Sasuke’s head; the other is hidden by the dark, voluminous folds of their robes. 

“Oh, my _God_ ,” says Suigetsu, sounding half-delirious with glee. 

“ _What_ ,” says Karin, again. 

Karin’s cousin shoves Sasuke abruptly from him. “We _need_ you,” he says. His voice is low, rough and intense; he appears to be on the verge of tears. “ _I_ need you, you stupid bastard!”

“You think I care,” says Sasuke, monotone. 

“I _know_ you care!” yells Karin’s cousin, wiping furiously at his eyes. “I just wanna – look, our bond is precious, okay? It’s meaningful to me! And it’s meaningful to you too, asshole, if you’d –” the tears are flowing freely now, loud and snotty, and he swipes the sleeve of his robes beneath his nose, “– just _see_ it! What have I gotta do to make you see it, huh? Sasuke? You tell me _that_!”

Sasuke considers this. Then he says, “No.”

Karin’s cousin glowers at him through his tears. Sasuke stares blankly back. 

“Suit yourself!” explodes Karin’s cousin, half a second later, and spins on his heel and storms out, his half-unbuttoned shirt flapping as he goes. 

“You gonna tell us what that was about?” says Suigetsu, when it becomes clear that Karin is trembling from some emotion too intense to permit her speech. 

Sasuke looks at them, expressionless. He zips up his trousers. “Quidditch.”

“Of _course_ it wasn’t Quidditch!” Karin howls later, finally freed from the paralysing combined effects of horror, bitter jealousy, and extraordinary lust, and collapses face-first onto the common room table. Glittering fake snow showers across her homework. “Sasuke’s _zip_ was open!”

“Still could’ve been Quidditch, though,” says Suigetsu. He’s never tried to be the voice of reason before. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t like it. “I mean, like – do we actually _know_ what those guys get up to? There’s always drama going on with those two, right? Maybe it _is_ Quidditch. Maybe every time they get the whole fucking school shut down for monsters or whatever they’re actually just fussing over Quidditch.”

“My cousin was _wanking him off_ ,” says Karin. 

“Whatever,” says Suigetsu. “He’s _an_ Uzumaki, right? That’s a start, right? Better than nothing? At least you’ve – whoa, _fuck_ —!”

He hurls himself under the table; her jinx goes wild. A second year behind them spends the next week with a very tight perm. 

“Perhaps it’s the Winter Ball,” says Juugo. 

Karin lifts her tear-stained face from her arms. “The what?”

“The Winter Ball,” Juugo says, again. He dips his quill and continues with his essay – which is looking far too close to finished, three sheets of drying parchment already laid out neatly on the table. “People are looking for dates, so – um. There’s a lot of tension involved. I’m... trying to avoid it.”

“ _I_ never heard anything about any Winter Ball,” says Suigetsu, in a tone that very much implies that only things he’s heard of should be trusted. 

“That’s probably because you never get involved in anything,” says Juugo, in a tone so mildly factual that even Suigetsu seems to be having some difficulty working out a way to take it as an insult. “You’re lazy and isolated. And very self-obsessed, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“ _I_ don’t mind you saying so,” says Karin. “Say it more often. Say it every day. I never heard about any Winter Ball either, though.”

“Uh,” says Juugo. His quill comes to a halt, but he doesn’t look up. “Actually – I was actually talking about both of you. Just then. Sorry.”

A moment of silence, as Karin finds herself once again too overwhelmed to speak. 

“Anyway, I’m just going with Kimimaro,” says Juugo. He dips his pen, and resumes his work, apparently oblivious to the situation escalating – furiously, silently – at his side. 

“Say, Karin,” begins Suigetsu, speculatively, “how’d you feel about going with –”

He doesn’t duck in time; her jinx hits perfectly. The ensuing artificial perm resists even the best efforts of Sasuke’s Muggle hair straighteners, borrowed without permission on account of the fact Sasuke has spent the last four years stashing them secretively beneath his bed every morning, and still thinks Suigetsu doesn’t know about them. 

In the end, Sasuke attends the ball alone, and skulks the edges of the dancefloor casting darkly ominous looks at all who cross his path – but Karin’s cousin attends with a stunningly gorgeous witch who neither Karin nor Suigetsu nor Juugo have ever seen around the castle before. Her blonde hair cascades in luscious waves to her pert and perfect butt; she stands three inches taller than Karin’s cousin himself, and showers him with grotesquely public displays of affection, non-stop, for _hours_. 

And then a few minutes into the night’s first slow dance, the transfiguration slips. Karin’s cousin is left alone on the dance floor, the clammy weight of his pet toad in the palm of his hand; his dazzling partner is nowhere to be seen. 

Predictably, Karin’s cousin responds by hexing Sasuke. More predictably still, Sasuke responds by hexing Karin’s cousin right back. Karin, loitering at the edge of the dancefloor with her date for the evening – a lesser Uchiha, possessed of Sasuke’s dark hair and reddened eyes, but none of the devastating grace with which Sasuke wields them – responds by hexing Suigetsu, for no better reason than that her mood is foul and hexing Suigetsu is always a good idea, and though Suigetsu responds to this with outrage the ball has, by this point, wholly deteriorated into a vicious and chaotic battle of student versus student, and it’s impossible for him to tell if Karin was really the one responsible for his freshly beribboned dress robes. 

 

+++

 ** _Third year  
_**   
“Come with me,” says Sasuke, one Saturday morning early in January, and looms over Suigetsu’s bed until he drags himself out of it. Sasuke is wearing formal, high-collared robes and a look of heartless indifference for the fact it’s barely six o’ clock, and he stalks out of the room before Suigetsu’s even got his slippers on. 

They find Karin snoring peacefully on a chaise longue in the common room, a library copy of _Charms For The Charming_ open over her face. Sasuke lifts it away; a glossy catalogue of male Muggle underwear slides out from beneath it; she wakes with a start and a yell, casting a panicked jinx in the direction of a gilted antique ceiling light. 

Glass shatters down. Sasuke doesn’t flinch. “Come on,” he says curtly, and Karin’s face is suffused at once by deep pink. 

The three of them meet Juugo coming down the dungeon stairs, his pet owl on his shoulder. “Oh,” he says, and then, “Your brother?” he says, and Sasuke nods. 

“What about him?” says Karin. 

“I’m going to duel him,” says Sasuke. 

“You couldn’t have duelled him after breakfast?” says Suigetsu. 

“My brother practises yoga with the sunrise,” says Sasuke, and that’s that. 

He leads them to an empty classroom in the East Wing. Its ceiling is cavernously high. The desks are arranged in tiered ranks all the way down to the front of the class, where the professor’s lecture podium has been scooted heavily aside to make space. Itachi is already there. Sasuke is already scowling. Very soon, the dusty blackboard is lit in rapidly flickering blasts of light, and various illegal-sounding curses are slamming craters into the stone walls. 

The three of them slump in the back row with a friend of Itachi’s. The friend of Itachi’s is very tall, his hair charmed a vivid blue along with most of his body, and he’s remarkably genial for such an uncouth hour of the morning: so genial, indeed, that before long Juugo has formally introduced him to his owl, and the two of them are discussing the care of magical creatures in lowered, knowledgeable tones. 

“I’ve got no idea what’s going on,” Karin says, eventually, as down beside the lecture podium Sasuke stumbles to his knees, hands to his eyes, blood pouring from between his fingers. Itachi Uchiha – Head Boy of Hogwarts, teetotal Hufflepuff, clean-living vegan – stands over him, laughing hysterically. 

“I’ve heard there’s bad blood between them,” says Juugo, absently scratching at his owl’s ruff. 

“No kidding,” says Itachi’s friend, and props his feet up on the backs of the chairs in front. He’s generously pretending not to notice the adoring light of Suigetsu’s stare. “Itachi asked if I’d come keep an eye on his wheatgrass smoothie for an hour or so, and –” He lifts the cup of sludge-coloured liquid in his hand, and offers a rueful shrug. “I keep my nose out of Itachi’s business, he keeps his out of mine. I’ve got no idea what’s going on.”

Unable to hold back any longer, Suigetsu interrupts: “Your teeth are _so_ sharp.”

“Mangetsu’s brother, right?” Suigetsu nods. Itachi’s friend grins. His teeth really are that sharp. “Kid, I taught your big brother his filing charm myself.”

The adoring stare turns starstruck; and, down at the front of the classroom, Sasuke casts the Cruciatus curse. Or – perhaps Itachi casts it? – or perhaps they’ve _both_ cast it, simultaneously, since there’s definitely enough screaming going on that that could be the case. Juugo covers his ears and starts breathing deeply. 

“Are we meant to be stopping them?” says Karin. 

“God knows,” says Itachi’s friend. “Pure-blood families, eh?”

Karin peers dubiously down the ranks of desks. The screaming comes to an abrupt halt: both brothers are breathing heavily, their faces at a markedly intimate distance of remove. Murmurs of _brother_ drift up to them, and then professions of love, delivered in raw whispers. Itachi wipes blood, gently, from Sasuke’s cheek. Sasuke cups his hands at the back of Itachi’s head and presses their foreheads together. 

“Pure-blood families,” Itachi’s friend says, again. His voice is wearily knowing, and yet that fails to answer even a single one of Karin’s many, _many_ questions. 

 

+++

 ** _Fifth year  
_**   
“The annual Parents’ and Governors’ Meeting is tomorrow evening,” says Sasuke. His voice is low. Their chairs are pulled in close around the chess table, heads bent in strategy planning. “We will be attacking as it begins.”

A straggle-haired grindylow raps a tentacle against the closest window. The window is high and arched and stained deep green by algae. The grindylow gives up and drifts on by. “Attacking – the meeting?” says Juugo. 

“Yes,” says Sasuke. 

“The Parents’ and _Governors’_ Meeting?” says Juugo. 

“The Parents’ and Governors’ Meeting,” Sasuke confirms. 

Juugo frowns down at the chessboard. A rook sticks out its tiny, ivory tongue at him. He crushes it with a single thump of his fist and then jerks back, alarmed. “Sorry – sorry, sorry...”

“Well?” says Sasuke. 

“Alright,” says Karin. 

“Fine by me,” says Suigetsu. 

“Um,” says Juugo. “Yes. Attacking the meeting. If that’s what you want.”

“It is,” says Sasuke. 

They attack the meeting. 

By the time the dust has cleared, the sparks have settled, and the vicious little ginger Hufflepuff who’s acting as Youth Representative this term has cursed the entire meeting room full to the ceiling with sand, nothing is much clearer. 

“I’m actually a prefect?” says Suigetsu, his back to the wall, stuffing his wand hurriedly out of sight in the inside pocket of his robes. “And so’s Juugo? We were actually – on patrol, what with us both being prefects – Karin Uzumaki,” he says, with a fresh burst of confidence, “ _she’s_ the one you want, I totally saw her Stupefy the Minister –”

The attendees of the Annual Parents’ and Governors’ Meeting are unconvinced by this argument. Particularly, they’re unconvinced by the way that no one but Suigetsu and Juugo is in the nearby area, and by the way that both of them are slightly charred, dazed-looking, and temporarily rendered without depth perception as the consequence of a mass hypnosis spell Sasuke really, really, _really_ shouldn’t have been using. Hidden behind the heavy velvet drapes of a nearby vestibule, Karin and Sasuke watch the two of them get dragged away for questioning. 

“What if they’ve beenexpelled?” Karin says, hours later, pacing the width of the common room. She whirls on Sasuke, wild-eyed behind her glasses. “What if _we’re_ expelled? What if they listen to Suigetsu?”

Sasuke is gazing into the fire. He doesn’t look round. “No one listens to Suigetsu.”

“He gave them my _name_ ,” says Karin. Sasuke seems unmoved. “He _gave_ them my _name_ ,” she elaborates, loud and slow, and jabs a significant thumb at herself. 

Sasuke shrugs. “That doesn’t compromise me,” he says. 

If it wasn’t for the heart-stoppingly elegant dance of the firelight across his profile, Karin would kick his face in. His beautiful face. His stupid goddamn beautiful face, which she _hates_. She curls up on the sofa and fumes silently to herself until she falls asleep, at which point her sleeping mind takes over the fuming, and offers her up a singularly soothing dream: of Sasuke tossed into the lake, there to suffer in an appealingly soaking wet kind of way while Karin watches from the bank, mercilessly ignoring his desperate cries, perhaps eventually deigning to rescue him and dry him off, maybe warm him up, maybe _heat_ him up... 

Her temper has eased by the time she’s shaken into wakefulness, hours later; she lifts her head blearily from her folded arms, sees Suigetsu, and nearly knocks over a gilted ornamental table-lamp as she leaps to her feet. “Did you tell on me?” she demands, wand jammed beneath his chin. “And Sasuke? Are we all going to Azkaban?”

“ _No_ – no, of course we didn’t, _obviously_ we’re not – what the hell are you doing, Karin, can you get that thing away from me?”

“ _Why_ didn’t you tell?” Karin snaps, and jams her wand a little higher, just to drive the threat home. 

“If you and Sasuke end up in Azkaban, what the hell would me and Juugo do all day?” 

Karin considers this. Then she considers Sasuke, scowling furiously in his sleep, curled into his armchair before the fire. Like hell if she’s ever gonna say it out loud, but Suigetsu does have a point. Grudgingly, she lowers her wand. 

“All we ever _do_ is hang around Sasuke,” Suigetsu says. He rubs at his throat and glares at her, expression deeply aggrieved. “This place is boring enough already, I’m not taking the risk of getting rid of you. I’d have to find _hobbies_.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Any comments would be appreciated! ♥ And if you ever feel like talking about Team Taka-related subjects, and/or inexplicable crack crossovers, I'm [over here on tumblr](http://www.uzumakiwonderland.tumblr.com/).]
> 
> ETA: Now with [perfect, hilarious art](http://uzumakiwonderland.tumblr.com/post/115074848019/basedtaka-did-everyone-read-this-fic-yet-by-the) by [tumblr user basedtaka](http://www.basedtaka.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> ETA 2: [And more art](http://uzumakiwonderland.tumblr.com/post/115397932184/basedtaka-i-cant-believe-hp-au-itachi-is-a)! Along with [a whole lot of cracky worldbuilding](http://uzumakiwonderland.tumblr.com/tagged/this-hogwarts-au-needs-a-name/chrono) going on in this tag.


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